HART
John GRIER HIBBEN

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

My friends, I never can sufficiently express the obligations I am
under to the territory of Dakota, for it was here that I lived a
number of years in a ranch house in the cattle country, and I regard
my experience during those years, when I lived and worked with my own
fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier, as the most important
educational asset of all my life. It is a mighty good thing to know
men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them. When
you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not
have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself. Every now
and then I am amused when newspapers in the East--perhaps, I may say,
not always friendly to me--having prophesied that I was dead wrong on
a certain issue, and then finding out that I am right, express acid
wonder how I am able to divine how people are thinking. Well,
sometimes I don't and sometimes I do; but when I do, it comes simply
from the fact that this is the way I am thinking myself. I know how
the man that works with his hands and the man on the ranch are
thinking, because I have been there and I am thinking that way myself.
It is not that I divine the way they are thinking, but that I think
the same way.

Theodore ROOSEVELT
Speech at Sioux Falls
_September 3, 1910_.

ROOSEVELT IN THE BAD LANDS

I

Rainy dark or firelight, bacon rind or pie,
Livin' is a luxury that don't come high;
Oh, be happy and onruly while our years and luck allow,
For we all must die or marry less than forty years from now!

Badger CLARK

The train rumbled across three hundred feet of trestle and came to a
stop. A young man, slender, not over-tall, with spectacles and a
moustache, descended the steps. If he expected that his foot, groping
below the bottom step in the blackness for something to land on, would
find a platform, he was doomed to disappointment. The "depot" at
Little Missouri did not boast a platform. The young man pulled his
duffle-bag and gun-case down the steps; somebody waved a lantern; the
train stirred, gained momentum, and was gone, having accomplished its
immediate mission, which was to deposit a New York "